The Virgin of Zesh & the Tower of Zanid (5 page)

V

Next morning Althea lay on her pallet, too sore and miserable to move, when a change in the motion of the ship aroused her. She came out to see the
Labághti
hove to captain, passengers, and crew gathered around the mainmast. The captain gave an order, and a couple of sailors untied the prisoner. Gottfried Bahr said in a low voice, “The captain told them to—ah—I don’t know how you would sat it;
zu kielholen ihn.”

“Keelhaul him!” said Kirwan.

“What’s that?” asked Althea. “I’ve heard the word—”

“Sh!” said Kirwan. “You’ll see.”

While the Terrans were speaking, grinning sailors tied four long ropes to the limbs of the accused. Three of them hustled him to the bow, while a fourth walked aft along the rail, paying out one of the ropes over the side as he went.

The sailors holding the remaining three ropes then seized the culprit and threw him off the bow. His shriek was cut off by the splash.

The sailor who had walked to the stern, standing braced, began hauling in his rope so that the victim was drawn underwater and back along the ship’s keel. Two of the rope-holders walked slowly aft, each leaning over the rail, one on each side and holding his rope, so that the sailor was kept centered under the keel. Meanwhile, the remaining rope man remained at the bow, paying out his rope as the sailor was pulled away from him.

Bahr said, “There is an easier way to haul him from one side of the ship to the other, but the captain means to make an example of him.”

“But he’ll drown!” cried Althea unhappily.

“Hush, girl,” said Kirwan. “ ’Twill be a small loss.”

Bahr said dryly, “I think that the punishment is timed so that the victim can just survive if he keeps his head and takes a long breath before being drawn under. But I doubt if this one so much presence of mind had.”

“If he’d been that smart,” said Kirwan, “he’d not have got into trouble in the first place. At least, darling, you can’t complain you don’t attract the men. First Gorchakov, now this felly.”

In time, the sailor appeared at the stern of the ship. Two Krishnans hauled the body up over the stern. It lay still on the poop deck, with water running off its greasy skin. Althea approached it fearfully. She had never before seen a man or a humanoid who had died by violence. She said, “He might have a little life in him. We ought to try artificial respiration.”

“It is best not to interfere,” said Bahr.

“Besides,” said Kirwan, “what d’you want to bring the bastard back for? Good riddance, I’d say.”

“No, that’s against my principles,” said Althea.

She bent over the body, from which the sailors were untying the ropes. If the Earthmen would not help, she would have to do her duty.

She tugged and heaved the bulky body into prone position, straddled it, and began pumping air into its lungs. Captain Memzadá burst into questions. Bahr answered these and explained to Althea, “I have told him that it is a religious rite. He says that now he knows all Terrans are mad, but he will not interfere.”

Althea continued pumping until she got tired. Then the other Terrans, shamed into action, relieved her. Bahr had just taken over from Kirwan when the body began to stir, groan, and cough. The rest of the ship’s company cast startled glances at the Terrans and edged away from them.

Althea and her companions left the sailor huddled in a corner of the poop deck, collapsed but alive. The captain looked at them with an unreadable expression as they walked past him at the tiller. The
Labághti
had long since been under way again.

Later that day, Althea, sitting in the bow in a reverie, was approached by her companions and the revived sailor. Bahr said, “This man is very perplexed. He would like to ask you some questions.”

“All right,” said Althea.

“First, he wishes to know if your reviving him meant that you had changed your mind and wished to go to the races with him after all. The last expression is, I believe, a euphemism.”

“Of course not. I revived him because I considered death too severe a punishment for what he had done.”

Bahr and the sailor conversed. The former said: “Do you mean, he says, that you went to all that trouble over a mere question of justice?”

“That’s right.”

The sailor shook his head. Bahr said, “He wants to know if you wish to be friends with him?”

“No.”

Bahr told the sailor, and Kirwan added a few words in his own broken Gazashtandu, explaining: “I told the beggar if he so much as came within reach of you, I’d take his hide off personally and use it to bind me next book.”

Time slipped by as the
Labághti
plodded her way eastward among the islands of the Sadabao Sea. Althea turned brown from the sun and even put on a little weight, while Bahr lectured her on the theory and technique of intelligence testing. The hopeless trapped feeling which had come upon her when she stepped off the spaceship at Novorecife and learned that Bishop Raman was away, subsided. She did not, however, get over her tendency to scan the western horizon for the sail of a pursuing ship.

The three Terrans were standing in a cluster at the poop deck rail and watching the island of Jerud slide below the horizon when Althea asked, “Gottfried, how are you going to test the Záva?”

Bahr lit his pipe. “That depends on the mental level that I find. On the ordinary Mangioni scale, which takes the consolidated averages for the whole human race as one hundred percent, the tailless Krishnans average one hundred and two and the Koloftuma seventy-eight, so one would normally test the latter by the tests used for preadolescent human beings. But if the rumors be true, I may have to use the Takamoto genius test.”

“Ha!” said Kirwan. “And what does an intelligence test measure? Why, the ability to pass an intelligence test, nothing more!”

Althea asked, “What’s happened on Zá to get the Interplanetary Council and the Terran World Federation so excited?”

“Well,” explained Bahr, “thirty years ago, Terran time, the Záva were living the same sort of savage lives that the tailed Krishnans of Koloft and Fossanderan still do. The other Sadabao Islanders raided them to catch the young for slaves, the adults being too intractable. But they had never been able to conquer Zá, not so much because of the resistance of the Záva, whose sticks and stones could not have done much against armored men with swords and crossbows, as because of the shape of the island, which like Zesh is surrounded by steep cliffs with only two landing places.

“Then word began coming out that the Záva were rapidly changing their way of life. In a few years, they acquired a form of writing, a well-organized government, a system of law, and are said to have constructed a lot of well-planned and spacious buildings instead of the wretched huts of stones and mud. The latest report has it that they are building a small but serviceable navy of rowing galleys of advanced design. Now, these things do not happen so quickly of their own accord.”

“Do you suppose there’s some Earthman on Zá teaching them?” asked Althea.

“I do not think so,” replied Bahr. “I made inquiries of Mr. Gorchakov, who showed me what careful track his office has kept of all the Earthmen on Krishna. Moreover, when the Saint-Rémy treatment was introduced, the authorities at Novorecife had great success in getting these Earthmen to come in and submit to treatment.”

“I should think some would have refused,” said Althea.

“Ah, but Novorecife can always cut off their longevity doses. That is how the technological blockade was as successful as it was before the Saint-Rémy treatment. Few Earthmen cared to jeopardize their extended life span for the sake of a quick profit among the Krishnans. And the only record of Earthmen on Zá in the last half-century is a missionary couple, who are known to have been eaten.”

Althea winced. Bahr added, “There is said to be a brilliant chief named Yuruzh directing their efforts. He at least would be worth testing.”

“Gottfried my boy, wasn’t there a fellow on Earth who treated some monkeys so they became as intelligent as men, only more so?” asked Kirwan.

“Yes, that was J. Warren Hill, an American psychologist—unless like many of his colleagues you consider him a charlatan. And it was apes, not monkeys.”

“But it worked, didn’t it?” said Kirwan.

“His system? Yes and no. He had a system of hypnotherapy called Pannoëtics, developed from some heterodox schools of twentieth-century psychological thought.”

“What did it do?” asked Althea.

“Pannoëtics claims to clear up all the traumata not only in the nervous system but in the germplasm as well. Of course, orthodox psychology does not yet admit that an alteration to the soma can affect the germplasm, but there is still some inconclusive evidence pointing in that direction. Well, the reason the original systems of hypnotherapy did not work was, it is supposed, that the human race had been civilized so long that the ancestors of all the present-day men have been subjected to frustrations and similar traumata for hundreds of generations. So one must by one’s hypnotherapy cure not only the man but a long line of ancestors, too. Therefore, when Hill tried his system on human beings, it simply made most of them completely and hopelessly psychotic.”

Kirwan said, “Ha! And doesn’t that prove the Roussellians right about your rotten decadent civilization?”

Ignoring him, Bahr continued. “But, Hill thought, if the germplasm of human beings is hopelessly traumatized, that of chimpanzees would not be, as they have never been civilized. So he modified his system for application to chimpanzees, with astounding results. He gave them an intelligence rating, on the Mangioni scale, of 134—which puts them up with the geniuses among Earthmen.”

Althea said, “I should think that would be fine; you’d have ready-made geniuses to solve all human problems.”

“It did not work out that way. Having no civilized culture, these apes had none of the inhibitions and cultural attitudes that made civilized life possible. In personality they were still apes: excitable, irresponsible, mischievous, destructive, sexually promiscuous, and emotionally unstable.”

“Why just apes?” growled Kirwan. “Sure, you’ve just described most human beings.”

“It is a matter of degree, my friend. Anyway, it soon became obvious that the ape-geniuses were a menace, because they used their intelligence not to help humanity, but also to plot to enslave mankind to a race of super-apes. At that point, the World Federation forbade Hill to go on with his experiments. They did not destroy the apes already treated, as that might have been considered genocide.”

Althea interjected, “Might Hill have come to Krishna?”

“No. One ape, thwarted in his plot to impose an ape aristocracy on the world, used his genius secretly to manufacture a quantity of nitroglycerine. One day, Hill’s laboratory in Cuba, Hill himself, and his whole ape colony blew up with a frightful explosion. Naturally, I at once thought of a connection between Hill and the events on Zá, but in spite of all my detective work I have not been able to find any. The few tailed Krishnans who have been allowed to visit Earth either died there or returned to Krishna no more intelligent than they left it.”

Kirwan glanced about and said in a lowered voice, “Speaking of detective work, I found out what this cargo is. I pried open one of the cases and peeked.”

“What is it?” said Althea.

“Weapons.”

Bahr spoke up. “Do you mean Terran weapons, guns and the like, such as some Earthmen have at times attempted into Krishna to smuggle?”

“No, native stuff: swords and helmets and things. I wonder if the Dasht of Darya is about to enlarge his realm?”

Bahr shrugged. “It does not matter to us. These petty kings and nobles are always fighting their little wars. Last year, I am told, a philosopher of Katai-Jhogorai issued a manifesto calling for one global government for Krishna, but the Krishnans paid no more attention than our own ancestors would have a few centuries ago.”

Soon after Jerud had disappeared, another land mass appeared ahead. In the bow, Kirwan pointed it out to Althea. “That’s Zá, with Zesh in front of it.”

As the ship neared the land, the smaller island of Zesh detached itself from the main mass. Zesh lay southwest of Zá and like it was largely surrounded by tall cliffs. Above these could be seen the greens, browns, mauves, and purples of Krishnan vegetation.

Althea looked at Zesh, and beyond to dark Zá with its crown of forest. She wondered how it would have been if Bishop Raman had ordered her to land on Zá and plunge into forests full of tailed, man-eating Krishnans.

A Krishnan voice murmured apologetically behind them. Althea turned to see the sailor who had been keelhauled. The fellow stood twisting his feet and hanging his head, as if about to confess eating his mother. At last he held out a folded sheet of Krishnan paper. He spoke, slowly so that Althea could understand most of it.

“This is for you, my lady. Take it, I pray you, but read it not ere ye’ve landed on yonder isle.”

Althea took the paper, not knowing quite how to handle the situation. She supposed that it was some sort of written apology—perhaps even a love letter. With an inarticulate mumble, the sailor turned and scampered back to his duties.

“Read it,” said Kirwan.

“No, he asked me not to,” said Althea, and put the paper away.

Captain Memzadá barked commands. The ship altered course, the sails swinging to match the turn. The cliffs came nearer. Althea could now see a long stretch of beach on the south side of the island. The water in front of it seemed to be shallow far out.

On the top of the forest-crowned plateau or mesa, a gleam caught Althea’s eye. She had a dim impression of a building with a dome or tower of some shiny material, but the structure was mostly hidden by the trees. The gleam faded.

The
Labághti
hove to and put its little ship’s boat over the side. As the dinghy was not big enough to carry all three Terrans and their baggage, Bahr explained, “The captain says that we three should go ashore first, and he will by a second trip send the luggage.”

“Oh no he don’t!” said Kirwan. “What’s to stop him from dropping us off and sailing away with our gear? Tell him to take one or two of us plus some of the baggage, and a second trip for the rest.”